Unlocking Your Social Media Location History

I’m a big fan of social sharing, however, I’m also a huge fan of having access to my data, in particular, data shared along with location information. Most social sharing services support location tagging, however, they don’t really make it easy for you to access or even download your location history. That doesn’t mean it isn’t possible though! I’ve done a little digging into the popular services and have managed to find a number of hacks and tricks for accessing some of these data. One handy trick is enabled by using the very awesome IFTTT tool.

Cook up an IFTTT recipe to archive your location history from Foursquare!

If you’ve ever cooked up an IFTTT recipe then you may have noticed that there is integration with Foursquare. What this means is that you can easily setup a rule whereby IF you perform a Foursquare errr Swarm check-in THEN you can push that data to another service, like Google Docs! I created such a rule and the results is an automated trigger that updates a Google Spreadsheet (think XLS) along with my Foursquare checkin data, this includes date, place name, and location information – quite handy!